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User blog:Drahnian/School
Is happening now so I might not be on quite so much (by which I mean I'll probably still be on every day, just not for as long). It's an important year ("The most difficult year of your life!") in terms of exams and stuff so if I am online a lot please give me a sharp clip around the ear and tell me to revise something. In other news, I gave in to a moment of weakness and bought the Xenoblade: The Complete Guide book because a used one was going fairly cheap and it's got pretty cover art and I am terrible. It's surprisingly thick, and contains a whole ton of information that would probably be quite useful if I could read Japanese. It's split into five sections (for some reason labelled in English?) - Technic, Story, Map, Data and Extra. The Technic stuff seems (as far as I can tell from the pictures) to be a basic guide on how to play the game effectively, and a page per character which is probably really interesting and also seems to have a section on how each of their AIs work. It's also got a table of Arts, with numbers in most of the columns and text in one which I suppose gives a description of what they do. There's also a table of the Skills in much the same fashion. The Story section has a looooot of writing and a few small screenshots of places and some JCE-style images of certain story bosses with BOSS in big clear English letters to make certain you get that. In Map, as you could guess, there are the area maps and some more tables which might be a list of Unique Monsters found in the area (there's a "LV" column and a few times for some) and small notes at the bottoms of pages with Tips and Achievements and other ranom things. The Data section is huge, making up just over half the book, and is basically the JCE - full quest list with rewards and prereqs and what I guess are objectives (and a couple of screenshots for asthetics), a lot of colony 6 data, NPC profiles (with pictures, so that's handy), a load of weapons data and images, nice full body armour refs for everyone in everything (slightly too small to be used for completely accurate drawings I think, but decent for sketches / slightly inaccurate pictures). A table of art book sources (one shop and one enemy). More tables that I have no idea what they are listing. Very detailed collectables tables. Lots of pages with very closely packed text which I believe is enemy drop tables. And to complete it, some better-than-JCE images (sorry) of all the Unique Monsters (like, they appear to have been acquired in the same or a similar way, but they've mostly got much better angles, accuracy (for instance Deinos have flames coming from their backs, Skyrays have the correct colour scheme, Bargs don't look like horrific computer glitches) and proper Nebula images, which are very nice). The Extras bit is very small and for some reason on red pages, and has character profiles for all the main characters (I assume more on them as protagonists rather than playable characters) and wee bits on all the side characters who have official art. They all have a small paragraph about them (what do they say? I don't know) and stuff like age and height and species and I'm not certain what else. Then there's the entire plotline in small screenshots. And to finish off, two pages with more writing (credits maybe?) and more screenshots, which appear to be showing the merits of jumping from really high places and MFiora's speed armour. (There are 22 screenshots. 6 are completely scenic. 4 are fairly scenic with the playable character clearly visible (1 Shulk, 3 MFiora) and the other 12 are Speed armour Fiora from every possible angle and I really would like at least part of an explanation.) 10 / 10 would recommend if you need help finishing the game (but can't use the internet) and are fluent in Japanese. 6 / 10 maybe for reference image use (because they really are better than the JCE's and as far as I'm aware aren't online anywhere?). Really fast shipping though, it was supposed to arrive in early September. Although I guess that's down to the Ebay lister than the publishers. ... That's a bit long, sorry. Category:Blog posts Category:Blog posts